Saturday, September 8, 2012

Another color from Cirque's Dark Horse collection, one that combines two of my favorite things: purple and holo. This polish is called Fascination Street, so it actually manages to fit in one more of my favorite things.

Cirque Fascination Street. A blue-toned medium purple base with hidden gold shimmer and scattered holographic effect. It manages to strike a good balance between maintaining the vibrancy of the purple shade, creating a dark shade that isn't dramatically lightened by the silver-based holographic particles and still being light enough to not completely drown out the hologram effect. The rainbow shimmer from the holographic particles is still visible indoors (as seen here) but it's much, much more pronounced in direct light. It is a little bit like a england Lady of the Lake (ugh, remind me to get a better picture of that one), but more blue and with stronger holo.

Here's how it looks in very bright direct sunlight. See the golden shimmer coming out in the center of each nail?

And here it is with flash. Lots and lots of rainbow hologram sparkle!

The formula on this was good. Thin, smooth, even. It applied effortlessly and didn't challenge me with bald spots or streaking like holographic polishes sometimes can. It is a little more sheer than I thought it would be, but I'm wearing it with three coats here and I can't see any visible nail line. It's scented with a calming herbal-floral (smells like lavender to me) scent like the other Cirque polishes. Dry time is very good.

So... what do you think? I love it. Great shade of purple, cool name, nice, strong scattered holo effect and a good formula. Plus, it's scented! Can't really think of any downside to the polish itself, the only real criticism I can find with it is the price. Fascination Street (and Never Nude) is a little more expensive than the rest of the Dark Horse collection polishes due to the cost of the materials used to create the hologram effect; it's $16 compared to the usual $12.

Another gorgeous one from Cirque! Annie hasn't had a miss on one yet! They're all amazing! I'm still super excited to be the one who turned you onto Cirque with my pic of Epoch! <3 So glad you're loving them as much as I do! :D

Coincidence day! I had Tibetan Nights, Epoch and Vaudeville arrive this morning. I love Annie , she's lovely to deal with and her formulas are pretty great too. I think fascination street is one of my favourites, and you would never know she's an independent manufacturer from the packaging. We can't expect an indie to be able to match the prices of a big company, but I think these are worth every penny. Great review as always.

I have dark horse but I didn't like the application. It was like painting black sand on my nails and required quite a few coats to get it to the opacity i wanted. You made it look absolutely fantastic! So I think it could be my skill as well but I also don't think I hve the patience with it.